This story is from Planet Detroit’s Neighborhood Reporting Lab, where community reporters write about health and climate issues in their neighborhood. Neighborhood Reporting Lab is supported by the Americana and Kresge Foundations.
Thomasenia Johnson first started making blankets out of plastic bags to help unhoused people stay warm at her church, Christ the Good Shepherd, in 2019. The church crafts class shut down amid the pandemic, but Johnson kept going.
Today, Johnson crochets in between songs at the Roberto Clemente Recreation Center, where she is the Friday night dance instructor. She teaches a class of 7–10 people ballroom dancing, line dancing, and hustles. Her repertoire ranges from Beyonce’s Texas Hold Em Hustle to the famed Tamia Hustle and everything in between.
Johnson knows her materials after a few years of making the plastic blankets. Each bag has its own weight and thickness, translating into a heavier or lighter blanket. “The Meijer bags are heavier than the Kroger brown bags,” she told Planet Detroit.
Thomasenia explains the step-by-step process of sorting, separating, and then flattening the bags before she can crochet long pieces of plastic known as “plarns,” a portmanteau of plastic plus yarn.
First, she sorts the bags by color and store, with some bags being a single color and others having two or more colors.
“I don’t want to mix them up when I’m doing what I’m doing,” she says. After sorting them into piles, she separates them based on color combinations she fancies combining. Last, she flattens the bags 3-5 at a time and cuts off the top and bottom edges of the bags, leaving the center square, which she cuts into three equal-sized sections.
Once each squared section is fully opened, the flattened sections of long plastic strips are fashioned into a T-shape to form a long continuous string wrapped like yarn into a ball of “plarn. From this ball, Thomasenia begins to crochet the plarn using a large, plastic Q17 hook,
Johnson then crochets long plarns into 4’ x 6’ or 5’ x 7’- inch squares that form a beautifully colored, insulated blanket. While she does not follow a pattern, her blankets are patterned based on colored plarns and are a product of the color schemes manufacturers create. The last step is personally distributing the blankets to unhoused people across the city.
She says there is “no one place” she distributes the blankets. She simply offers them to those she encounters as she moves around the city. If someone asks her for money, she will instead ask if they would like a free blanket or “mat,” as she prefers to call them, and they will either accept her offer or not. It’s purposeful and practical, and that’s just how she likes it.
Plastics can be found on all seven continents and in every ocean. The National Academies Press reports that approximately one-fifth of 2019 global plastic production happens in North America, only second to Asia.
Unfortunately, plastic does not decompose and accumulates in landfills and across the planet.
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“The only way to reduce and prevent plastic pollution is to produce and use much less plastic, according to the Plastic Soup Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sustainable practices and reducing plastics in our air, bodies, and water.
In April 2023, the Michigan House introduced a bill, H.B. 4359, which passed through a committee in November 2023 to allow communities throughout the state to ban reusable and single-use plastic bags. It has sat there ever since. Another House bill, H.B. 6122, introduced in 2022, would ban plastic microbeads, but the legislature has taken no action, and there is currently no statewide strategy to curb plastic usage or reduction.
Most of the bags Johnson uses are gifted to her, otherwise destined to be thrown out with the trash. These bags come from Kroger, Dollar Tree, Meijer, Dollar General, and department stores. Neighbors and friends have been known to bring Johnson large garbage bags full of small plastic shopping bags for her ongoing project.
She makes it well known to others that she needs plastic shopping bags because she is on a mission. She estimates that she has made two hundred blankets since she started in 2019.
And she plans to continue, as long as plastic bags exist and unhoused people in Detroit need help staying warm and dry.